


Leave Tonight Or Live And Die This Way

by TheHousekeeper



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-28
Updated: 2014-09-28
Packaged: 2018-02-19 01:46:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2369873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheHousekeeper/pseuds/TheHousekeeper
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>She holds out her hand, a heavy key ring dangling off her fourth finger. “Drive,” she says.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Leave Tonight Or Live And Die This Way

**Author's Note:**

> A scenario was niggling at me, so I wrote this: a fic in which nothing happens.
> 
> Set early S6, pre-OMWF. Entirely un-betaed. As in, I finished writing it about three minutes ago.

_You got a fast car_  
 _I want a ticket to anywhere_  
 _Any place is better._  
 _Leave tonight or live and die this way._

 

– – – – – – – –

 

When Spike comes upstairs, Buffy is leaning against the tomb, and the door to his crypt is swinging shut. She holds out her hand, a heavy key ring dangling off her fourth finger. “Drive,” she says.

Car key, worn shiny and smooth on its plastic end with years of handling. Three scuffed brass-coloured keys, matching in style but not in shape – must be for the house, he thinks: front and back doors, maybe the basement access or utility closet for the least-used. A half-bracelet of plasticky gimp, yellow and green, the kind a child might have made at summer camp for her mother but that was too small to fit all the way around her wrist. Spike’s throat closes up. He looks instead at a scratch on one of the house keys, the way the metal is shinier there than anywhere else and light stutters over it from the television, on mute behind him. He has been silent for too long. Buffy looks away.

“Please,” she says, but it doesn’t sound much like a plea at all. He takes the key ring, and tries not to notice how it catches on her finger for half a second. Just physics, making him think she might be holding on.

He drives into the desert. Buffy says nothing. The car is an automatic, a hulking, ungraceful thing shaped like a cross between a box and a fyorl demon trying to crouch. It runs quiet. The first car he’d ever driven, he remembers, hadn’t, but at least Model Ts didn’t smell like recycled air and tired fabric, didn’t have Coke stains darkening the back seats, and ancient breadcrumbs from after-school PB&Js drifting up against the floor mats. He turns off the air conditioning and cracks the window.

Buffy says nothing, and then says it again.

He stole a Model T, once, he remembers. It was raining, just past sunset, and he and Dru left the pale remains of the former owner in a ditch on the side of an Indiana farm road. A well-dressed young man beside a cornfield, suspenders and new black shoes. Blue argyle socks, he remembers. He had liked them. But the car had guttered to a stop in the meantime, and Spike couldn’t figure out how to start it up again. With the Model T, you had to hold the hand crank right, or else you’d break your thumb or sprain your wrist if the engine kicked back. He hadn’t known that, of course. Not then. And when his arm was yanked around, he’d yelled in pain, and Dru had laughed with her head thrown back and her wet hair clinging to her forehead and to the skin on her temples, and trailing long tendrils down her cheek, and then he’d laughed too, with the rain hammering a papery orchestra on the leaves of the unripened corn and the air smelling like damp earth and the metal of the still-hot hood.

He doesn’t know what to do with these memories, sometimes. He guesses they don’t really matter anymore. Clutter in his brain, the long strings that get pulled unexpectedly by old footage in documentaries, and lines of songs, and hardbound books, and driving nowhere at twelve o’clock in the morning, in a desert that still doesn’t smell familiar. Ever a stranger, in this part of the world.

The car drifts a little too far into the shoulder and the tires bump along the warning grooves there, for a second, thumping out _stranger stranger stranger_ , until he nudges the car back over and quiets them.

Buffy says nothing, and keeps on saying it.

They’ve been driving over an hour when he finally speaks. “Where’re we going, then?” Her face is turned towards the window. He can see only the curve of her cheek, the sweep of her jaw, her hair pulled back to reveal the muscles in her neck, pale as the starlight etches her contours. He can’t see her pulse beating up against the skin, so close, there, to the surface, but he imagines he can. She doesn’t blink, and there is too little light inside the car to show her reflection to him in the glass. He waits.

“Not going anywhere.”

“Then you’ll have to tell me when I should turn around.”

“Don’t,” she says, irritated.

“What?” He isn’t doing anything to offend her, he doesn’t think. Unless she wants him not to talk, which he’d be happy to do, sure, except that he doesn’t want to be out in the flat, empty, glare-filled desert when the sun comes up.

She is quiet for so long that he thinks he must have managed to stop doing whatever he was doing to annoy her. The cool air is gentle against his cheek, soft with the evening, and the road is empty and dark. He is driving fast, so fast that the sand, gray in the unlight, is a blur. He could be anywhere, he thinks. Most places, anyway. He remembers when the majority of America looked kind of like this. He and Dru had come around a few times, then, playing cards at the taverns that sprung up in the heartland and winning even when they lost, leaving with either cash clenched in their fists or the tang of blood thickening their throats. He feels old. So old that he might remember when Abraham set a knife to Isaac’s throat, on a mountain that looks like the hills Spike can see out the window. Maybe he pressed the blade too hard against the skin of Isaac’s neck, and three drops of blood chased one another down to the silver point, each faster than the last until they’d finished waiting for each other on the tip of the knife and fell, together, onto the gray sand. It could have happened. It could be just one of the things Spike has forgotten, or not known at the time that he should try to remember. Everyone thinks sacrifices get a raw deal. But it must be nice, he thinks, to know that you are so loved.

So loved that you could die.

“Don’t turn around,” Buffy clarifies. Her voice is slow and fades away. He doesn’t tell her that he’ll have to. She knows. He doesn’t dare turn again to look at her, not for many minutes.

By the time he does, she’s asleep.

The wind slaps against Spike’s ear. Humming along below him, the tires sound like they’re singing to the road. The sand is a gray blur. The desert feels like a dream, a dream that smells of dust and honey. He slows down, and doesn’t reach out to touch her shoulder.

At two o’clock, he says, “Buffy.” He doesn’t look at her, to give her some privacy as she comes back to the world, again. “Buffy.”

“Mm.” Her voice is gravely. He tries not to think about it. Out of the corner of his eye, he can tell when she fully wakes, because her shoulders tense, and she makes a tiny sound, one he wouldn’t be able to hear over the wind if he’d been driving five miles an hour faster. He tries not to think about it. He tries not to think.

“We have to turn around.”

“No,” she says.

“Well, unless you want me to turn into a crispy critter at the wheel and catch the car on fire then, yeah, we do.” But she doesn’t respond, and Spike doesn’t pull a U-turn across two empty lanes. The headlights catch moths, and it looks like it’s snowing. It could be snowing. He could pretend.

“Pull over,” Buffy says, and he does, off the shoulder and onto the sand, the SUV sliding around and throwing sand up from under its back wheels. He can’t make it very far, so he stops, turns off the car, pulls the keys from the ignition. He is holding the gimp bracelet, he realizes. He drops the keys into the cup holder. They clink, a small sound in the deep well of quiet after the engine noise. Spike’s ears are ringing. Desert insects whirr. They sit. Behind the car, the sand settles.

Buffy gets out, leaving the car door open. Spike watches her walk, a straight line towards the horizon. He thinks she’ll just keep going, an arrow into the coming morning, but she stops at a rock, and sits. After a minute, he joins her, his heavy boots sliding in the sand. There isn’t enough space on the rock. Instead he sits on the ground, knees up and arms wrapped loosely around them. Buffy is looking at the stars, the Milky Way bright so far away from the city.

“I don’t know their names,” she says. “I wanted to take an astronomy class, in school. I could be an astronomer.” Idly, she traces patterns beside her thigh, in the dust on the stone. “I think I’d have been happy,” she says, quietly. “Being an astronomer.”

Spike doesn’t think she would be, but then, he reconsiders, looking at her face, tired in the night, maybe he doesn’t have a right to think that.

“But I don’t know their names.”

Spike clears his throat, and turns his face towards the stars hanging low over the horizon. He points. “That red one, there? That’s Betelgeuse. Makes the shoulder of Orion, the hunter. He’s got a sword, there, and a belt, and a bow. And a dog, Sirius.” Spike moves his finger to the star on Orion’s heel, and Buffy shifts closer to follow his line of sight. His voice is hoarse, from the silent hours in the car. “Brightest star in the northern sky.”

“How do you know that?” Buffy asks.

“Dru liked stargazing.” They had once sunk a large fishing vessel, taking what they needed from the crew and throwing the bodies overboard. And then they’d smashed the hull and pulled down the rowboat, and Dru had made him stop halfway to shore in order to name the constellations, bright in the winter darkness, like suns so far away that they didn’t hurt. They almost hadn’t made it to the shadow of the coastal cliffs before dawn, and when Spike had complained about having to spend all day on the rowboat in a water-hollowed cave, Dru had told him that the stars didn’t care for the daytime, either. “No kidding,” he’d said, but she had smiled.

He drops his hand and looks away, at where his boots are leaving marks in the sand. Grains run down the rims and ridges of the imprints. Beside him is one of Buffy’s footprints, shallower. It is tiny. All of the things he remembers, and he cannot think of what to name the emotion that is swallowing up his chest and foaming up like sea spray in his throat. He lifts his arm again. “That, there. The weird-looking W. That’s Cassiopeia. Sitting on her chair.”

“Who was she?”

Spike shrugs. “Queen of Ethiopia, apparently. Story goes, she was put in the sky as punishment.” Buffy doesn’t ask, but she doesn’t say anything else either, which is the same thing. “She bragged that her daughter was more beautiful than the daughters of the sea.”

“Why was it a punishment, to be in the sky?”

“Dunno, I guess. Being in the night all the time, and far away from the world, forever.”

He hears her smile, a little. “Projecting much?”

“Well, if you don’t want to hear –”

“No!” she says, too quickly, and they both take several long moments to deal with that.

“We should go,” says Spike, eventually. He turns to look at her.

“Do we have to?” she asks, and closes her eyes, and, “Don’t say it.” He doesn’t. She opens her eyes again. They breathe, or one of them does. Spike thinks of the sound rain makes on a cornfield, and of blood-stained blue argyle socks, and the gritty feel of dusty cards in a saloon, and the smell of stone and sea, and doesn’t know what he wants.

“Yeah,” says Buffy. “Okay.”

On the way back to the car, Spike places the emotion rising like a bitter tide in his throat as sadness. The car starts with a quiet shudder. He remembers horse-drawn carriages, and how you could feel how every gap in the cobblestones guttered up from the hard wooden rims of the wheels through to your seat, and set your teeth vibrating for hours afterward. He remembers steamships. He remembers Pan Am flights over the Atlantic. He remembers that the stars looked a little different, a century ago.

He turns onto the road, and tries not to remember the way home.


End file.
